Nintendo Held Back Game Announcements at E3, 'Brand-new games' in Development

Nintendo wanted to satisfy existing Wii U owners first before announcing new games.

While many people came away from Nintendo's E3 Direct stream underwhelmed, Iwata stated in a shareholders meeting that they held back some game announcements on purpose. "However, we did not announce all of the games to be released during this period."

Nintendo announced games like Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World to relieve any tension of early Wii U adopters. Iwata claims that those unannounced games come from "brand-new types of games."

In order to not announce them too far ahead of their scheduled release, Nintendo chose to remain quiet on the new games in development for a stronger "impact in the market and minimize the chance of others introducing similar or competing products."

Many fans expected a hugely ambitious title from the Metroid Prime developers, Retro Studios, but instead found themselves watching a trailer for Donkey Kong Country Returns: Tropical Freeze.

With a lot of Nintendo's studios creating oddly familiar games like Mario Kart 8 and Super Mario 3D World, you could suspect that maybe these iterative titles aim to fill the gaps until the larger "brand-new games" release.

Iwata then went onto say that Nintendo "planned to satisfy existing video game fans first and provide new surprises later.” When looking at what Nintendo could easily produce, do these unannounced games represent the change many look for?

According to Iwata, we will only need to wait another year to find out.

For a summary of the stockholder meetings, you can find a nicely compiled post here.